Alice Hoffman Quotes

You can keep the things of bronze and stone and give me one man to remember me just once a year.

There is no death, daughter. People die only when we forget them,' my mother explained shortly before she left me. 'If you can remember me, I will be with you always.

Only our memories allow that some people ever existed. That they mattered, or mattered too much.

Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down.

For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost.

We have to remember everything. If we don't, by the time we grow up it'll be gone forever.

Only the forgotten are truly dead.

Will you remember me when I'm gone?

Lord, keep my memory green.

There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.

The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs.

Memory is the greatest of artists, and effaces from your mind what is unnecessary.

When I tell my colleagues that I remember 1969, 1974 and 1987, their eyes glaze over, but I'm afraid I do remember them, and I therefore err on the side of caution.

Just because someone's dead doesn't mean it's over. My grandfather died more than 25 years ago, but I still think of him a lot and smell his smell.

When I die Dublin will be written in my heart.

I've always been aware that to be named after someone from the past carries with it all kinds of bittersweetness.

Looking back across the years, so many pictures flash on the screen of my memory that just as I begin to see one clearly, another slides in, blotting out the first, itself to be pushed aside by the next and the next and the next.

It's very inconvenient because every time I finish, let's say, a chapter of a book, I think I'm going to ring Richard and then realize: Oh, Christ, I've buried him. I buried him last year.

If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

I think a lot of people want to be remembered the way they were, as opposed to the way they are now.

After my mom died, there was so much written about her fashion and her style and all that, and I felt that one of the most important parts of her was missing, her real intellectual curiosity.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

Imagine there wasn't photography. Where would we be? How would I remember what I looked like as a kid? It links us all. It keeps us all together; it's what our history is.